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I don’t think this is exclusively a Gen Z thing. I’m Gen X and could not agree more with this assessment.

Yes, this was a good 30 years in the making, so anyone still in a career will feel it. Even some younger boomers would feel the after effects of tbis, especially those who didn't get to own a house.

Gen Z is simply unique as the "full immersion" generation. It's uniquely hard to ignore the youth unemployment for kids who are spending more than ever to be educated, or being hard locked out of minimum wage jobs our parents would scare us with because they lack a bachelor's degree.


I certainly don't envy young people entering the job market rn. But China's youth unemployment rate is far higher than America's. To come away from this thinking American capitalism is bad and "communism" (which doesn't really exist anymore on a large scale) would be better would be pretty misguided.

CS new grads today have the highest # of interesting potential startups to join than ever before

Not according to...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelcollins/2025/12/15/compu...

or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46291504

Your statement might be correct, but the dust has yet to settle for us to be able to determine that.


I get a huge emotional reward by conjuring up something that I dreamed of but wouldn't have had time to build otherwise. The best description I can give is back in the day when you would beat a video game to see the ending.


I've had the opposite results. I used to "vibe code" in languages that I knew, so that I could review the code and, I assumed, contribute myself. I got good enough results that I started using AI to build tools in languages I had no prior knowledge of. I don't even look at the code any more. I'm getting incredible results. I've been a developer for 30+ years and never thought this would be possible. I keep making more and more ambitious projects and AI just keeps banging them out exactly how I envision them in my mind.

To be fair I don't think someone with less experience could get these results. I'm leveraging every thing I know about writing software, computer science, product development, team management, marketing, written communication, requirements gathering, architecture... I feel like vibe coding is pushing myself and AI to the limits, but the results are incredible.


I've got 20 years of experience, but w/e. What have you made?


I don't want to dox myself since I'm doing it outside my regular job for the most part, but frameworks, apps (on those frameworks), low level systems stuff, linux-y things, some P2P, lots of ai tools. One thing I find it excels at is web front-end (which is my least favorite thing to actually code), easily as good as any front-end dev I've ever worked with.


I think my fatal error was trying to make something based on "novel science" (I'll be similarly vague). It was an extremely hard project to be fair to the AI.

It is my life goal to make that project though. I'm not totally depressed about it because I did validate parts of the project. But it was a let down.


Baby steps is key for me. I can build very ambitious things but I never ask it to do too much at once. Focus a lot on having it get the docs right before it writes any code (it'll use the docs) make the instructions reflexive (i.e. "update the docs when done"). Make libraries, composable parts... I don't want to be condescending since you may have tried all of that, but I feel like I'm treating it the same as when I architect things for large teams, thinking in layers and little pieces that can be assembled to achieve what I want.

I'll add that it does require some banging your head against the wall at times. I normally will only test the code after doing a bunch of this stuff. It often doesn't work as I want at that point and I'll spend a day "begging" it to fix all of the problems. I've always been able to get over those hurdles, and I have it think about why it failed and try to bake the reasoning into the docs/tests... to avoid that in the future.


I did make lots of design documents and sub-demos. I think I could have been cleverer about finding smaller pieces of the project which could be deliverables in themselves and which the later project could depend on as imported libraries.


Interestingly enough there's a legislative push to make companies verify your real ID, I believe many porn companies already do this.


If you have a college degree, you might be able to work from home and not take your life in your hands twice a day on a freeway of death. If you don't have a college degree, you probably have to commute. If you live in a rural area you probably have to commute long distances, with low lighting on potentially icy and twisty single lane roads with oncoming traffic. In all the discussions of RTO vs WFH you almost never see safety mentioned, but it's an incredible upside to not having to drive to and from work every day.


Not that America's car culture isn't a dangerous problem, but I'm pretty sure highway deaths don't explain this...


There is also the added stress of commuting, which its fair to assume has negative impacts on heart, cognitive, etc. health.


Stress, risk, and stress compounding risk. So many people speed recklessly after having been stuck in traffic.

I would, however, not strongly link WFH to college and RTO to non-college. Many companies (as well as governments) have implemented RTO. The key outlier for WFH seems to be contracts and/or good negotiation skills.


Agreed (without regard to applicability of this article) - I was hit twice (i.e. other cars running into mine, their fault) within a calendar year after 5 day RTO went into effect in mid 2024 at work here (the valley).


I don't buy it. Road fatalities are probably the single easiest hypothesis to isolate. You can't put a label on a cancer or heart attack death, but you sure can for trauma deaths.


Coroners will almost never classify death by motor vehicle or aircraft collision or impact as suicide.


What percent of work from homers actually avoid the highway of death? Sure there are some living an urban car free lifestyle working from home, but plenty chose the opposite for their remote work, choosing space and inconvenience from job centers which in America inevitably means car centric exurban or rural living. I'd wager you are more at risk driving 5 miles for groceries on one of those single lane per direction 50mph rural roads than you are commuting in rush hour traffic at 16mph.


I'd love to see some actual data, but I'd bet that a large majority of pandemic WFH moves were to midrange CoL suburb sorts of areas that have reasonable job prospects within reach, so should push come to shove and they need to find local butt-in-seat employment they can. Major hospitals, airports, etc being reasonable to access is a big draw too.

That's what I did. Groceries are a 10m drive away on a bad day. I've lived the rural life and it's not glamorous so I have no desire to return.

Of course some did make the move out to places like you're mentioning, but my suspicion is that this group is actually not that large and the big splash they made in media (traditional and social) made their numbers seem greater than they are.


I went from 5 days a week or 2 hours per day behind the wheel to essentially nothing, maybe I drove once a week, maybe

Your wager is nonsense by the way.


I'm not so sure it is nonsense. Those rural 50mph roads are generally considered the most dangerous road type and many states prioritize turning them into actual divided roads due to prevalence of fatal accidents. Admittedly the rush hour traffic experience depends a lot on where you live; in the midwest you probably only see congestion on the exit itself and are otherwise going the full 60mph on even urban freeways, whereas in places like LA or NYC you aren't breaking a 16mph average no matter what road you are on during rush hour. Not a lot of ways to die going 16mph...


This is a tech article and has nothing to do with Sydney.


Israel has killed at least 83 people since the ceasefire agreement in Lebanon. They are terrorists.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/1/28/how-many-people-has...


I'm not interested in litigating this claim because it has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. If it helps, you can be as angry at Israel as you'd like without getting much flak from me (I'm angry too), just as long as we don't get to the "enemy-of-my-enemy" stuff that legitimizes Hezbollah.

I don't think "terrorist" is a useful label for either side. It wasn't "terrorism" when Hezbollah besieged Madaya; they did that as a military force.


As a US citizen I have absolutely no problem with Hezbollah. Why would I? They're no threat to me and indeed, are fighting people who are a threat to me.


Not only was Israel unprovoked, they have been the brutal aggressor for almost 100 years.


Israel's entire mode of operations is to kidnap, kill and rape civilians. They even rioted for their right to rape prisoners to death.


Jews use "goy" as a slur against non-Jews. As a so called "goy", I don't find "goybucks" offensive and in fact appreciate the attempt to reclaim the word.


Would you be ok with "abeedbucks"?


If it's self-depricating, sure. I'd love to see how my two cents in goybucks measure up in the eyes of a Muslim man.


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